Chen was amazed by the array of marmots in front of him: no fewer than sixty or seventy of the animals, big and small, stood on the slopes and peaks of a string of hills, looking like tree stumps after the loggers have left. Large brown males in front of large isolated burrows, the slightly smaller females with fur as yellow as wolf coats in front of burrow clusters. Babies, sometimes as many as seven or eight of them, their heads like little rabbits, stood around their mothers. The arrival of humans did not send them scurrying into their burrows; instead, they rose up on their hind legs, front legs in front of their chests, like little fists, and barked, each bark accompanied by an upward jerk of their bottlebrush tails, as if to warn the intruders away.
“People call this place Marmot Hill,” Bilgee said. “It’s crawling with them. Up north there’s another spot with even more than here. This place was once the salvation of the grassland’s poorest residents. In the fall, when the marmots were big and plump, they’d come here to catch them, eating the meat and selling the pelts and oil for money or for lamb. You Chinese are crazy about marmot overcoats, so each fall, the fur traders from Zhangjiakou come here to pick mushrooms and buy marmot skins, which are three times as expensive as lambskin. These little animals have saved more people than you know, including Genghis Khan’s family when they were living in hard times.”
“Marmots are tasty because of the fat,” Uljii said. “Other burrowing animals, such as ground squirrels and field voles, store up food for the winter months. But marmots get through the winter thanks to their fat.”
“After making it through the winter,” Bilgee said, “they have lost nearly all their fat, but there’s plenty of meat on their bones. See how big they are? Well, thanks to the abundance of grass this year, they’ll fatten up in no time.”
“No wonder the wolves haven’t been harassing us lately,” Chen said. “They like a change of diet too. But how do they catch them, since marmots never stray far from their deep burrows?”
“They’re expert marmot hunters,” Bilgee said with a laugh. “The big ones dig into the burrow entrance, sending the occupants scurrying out escape holes, where other wolves are waiting to kill and eat them. Sometimes smaller wolves actually dig their way deep into the burrow to catch and drag them out. Desert foxes also burrow in to get at them. When I come out to shoot marmots, I trap six or seven foxes every year, and once I trapped a small wolf. We learned to let our children crawl into wolf dens to get at the cubs from the wolves and the desert foxes. If their burrows are too shallow, the marmots will freeze, so they dig very deep-ten, maybe twenty feet. Can you tell me why wolf dens are so deep, since wolves don’t hibernate in the winter?” the old man asked Chen.
Chen shook his head.
“Because they often take over marmot burrows. A wolf will clear out one of these burrows and have her cubs inside.”
“That’s amazing,” Chen remarked. “Killing and eating a family of marmots isn’t enough for them. They have to take over their home as well.”
Uljii smiled with admiration. “That’s how they keep the marmots in check. They perform a great service, since the rodents are no good at all for the grassland. See what they’ve done to this hillside, burrows everywhere. They produce litters of six or seven every year. If their burrows stay small, there isn’t enough room for them all, so they dig bigger ones, destroying the grazing land for miles around. The four destructive pests of the grassland are field mice, wild rabbits, marmots, and gazelles, in that order. Marmots are relatively slow animals, and ought to be easy to catch. So why do we need to trap them? Because their burrows are interconnected. At the first sign of danger, they disappear in the web of tunnels. They forage voraciously, and in the fall they feed on seeds. One of those plump little bodies requires several acres of grass and seeds each year. There’s nothing worse for horses than a marmot colony. Every year we lose several horses that break their legs when they step in one of these burrows and throw their riders.
“Actually,” Uljii continued, “the burrows cause even more trouble that that. During the winter, they’re home to mosquitoes. The mosquitoes of Eastern Mongolia are world renowned. Mosquitoes in the Manchurian forests can eat a man alive. Ours can eat a cow. You’d think that out here, where the temperature plunges to thirty or forty below in the winter, cold enough to turn a sick cow into an ice sculpture, that it ought to freeze the mosquitoes. How do they make it through the winters? Marmot burrows. When winter closes in, they follow the marmots into the deep burrows, which are sealed up to keep the snow and ice out and the warmth in. The marmots sleep, going without food and water. But the mosquitoes have plenty of food and water, all from their hosts, making for a comfortable winter. Then when spring arrives, and the marmots leave their burrows, the mosquitoes follow them out and, given all the little lakes on the grassland, fly off to breed the next generation on the water. Come summertime, the grassland is mosquito heaven. See what I mean? Wolves are the prime marmot killers out here. We have a saying that goes, ‘When marmots leave their burrows, the wolves go up the mountain.’ Once the marmots are out in the open, the livestock can rest easy for a spell.”
Chen had been severely bitten for two summers, and the sound of mosquitoes was enough to make his hair stand on end. His skin felt as if it were being cracked and split; the Chinese students feared mosquitoes more than they did wolves. Eventually, he got his family to send mosquito netting from Beijing, and he began sleeping through the night. The herdsmen thought the netting was a wonderful thing, and it quickly became an essential part of the Mongol yurts. They called the nets “mosquito houses.”
“I’ve never seen in any book a word about the relationship between mosquitoes and marmots, or how the burrows are the mosquitoes’ bandit hideouts, or how wolves are their mortal enemies,” a skeptical Chen said to Uljii.
“The grassland is a complex place,” Uljii said. “Everything is linked, and the wolves are the major link, tied to all the others. If that link is removed, livestock raising will disappear out here. You can’t count all the benefits the wolves bring, far greater than the damage they cause.”
With a laugh, Bilgee said, “But don’t think that the marmots don’t benefit us at all. Their fur, their meat, and their oil are extremely valuable. Marmot skins are an important source of income for the herdsmen. The government trades them for automobiles and artillery. The wolves are smart, they don’t kill off all the marmots, so there’ll always be a supply for the next year. That’s true for the herdsmen as well. We take only the adults, not the young animals.”
As the horses sped through the mountains, the fearless marmots kept up the chorus of barks. Hawks attacked out of the sky, but failed most of the time. The farther northwest the men traveled, the fewer people they saw, and the fewer signs of habitation, until finally there weren’t even horse droppings anywhere.
When the three riders reached the top of a steep slope, spread out before them were hills so green they seemed unreal. As they crossed the hill, they saw yellow mixed in with the green, the color of last year’s grass, but the green on the mountains ahead was like a dyed stage curtain, or a fairyland in an animated movie. Uljii pointed with his whip. “If you’d come here last fall, you’d have seen only black mountains. It looks like they’ve been dressed in green felt, doesn’t it?” The horses picked up speed when they spotted the green mountains. Uljii led the way across gently rising land.
After crossing a pair of ridges, the party reached a green slope. It was covered with barley; not a single blade of yellow grass in sight, nor a trace of any unpleasant scent. The fragrance grew stronger, and Bilgee sensed that something was different. He looked down. The dogs also picked up a scent and checked out the area, nose to the ground. The old man bent down to get a closer look at the tall grass around the horses’ hooves. When he looked up, he said, “What do you smell?” Chen breathed in deeply, and could smell the fragrance of the tender new grass. It was like sitting on a horse-drawn mower in the fall, when the smell of cut grass floods the nose. “No one was out here cutting this, were they?” he asked. “Who could it be?”